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Thursday, April 7, 2011

Transitioning User Accounts

Having made the decision about which services to offer your school, the next step is to decide whether to bite on the bullet and transition everyone at once, or whether to test the waters with a few user accounts first.

"You can move everyone to the new infrastructure today, or you can try out the new account services with selected pilot users"

Pilot Group

We went for the selected pilot users option and moved a few teachers, a handful of students and some random accounts set up for subject areas. When you begin the transition Google offer you an email that they have created to send out to the people being moved to explain what was occuring. We accepted that offer - may as well see the reaction of the pilot users when they get that in their email inbox over the weekend!

The result was a mixed bag as most of the users had conflicting accounts and they had to work through thay process by themselves. The feedback from them clarified where the rest of the school would need support. And that is what led me to this series of blog posts and movie tutorials.

The first concern to me was that a small group of users were unable to be moved at this time - and that included me! It appeared that the one thing we had in common was that we have signed up to a lot of public Google services using our school domain email. We are still "on hold" today, waiting for them to sort us out. It seems that we can sort this ourselves though if we follow these four steps: